Halifax Oval Food Truck Rules Are Out of Touch

Halifax Oval Food Truck Rules Are Out of Touch

HALIFAX, CANADA – There is no question that The Oval provides a great opportunity for the people to get outside and be active during the winter months. Now in its third season, The Oval continues to attract more people to the centre of the city to skate, socialize and snack on local food fare. Pastry, that is.

The fact that Beaver Tails is the only food vendor at The Oval is not indicative of a latent connection between ice skating and pastry eating, but rather of the city’s unfamiliarity with how the mobile food industry actually works. In 2012, the city issued a Request for Proposal to the Mobile Food Services, offering local businesses a chance to compete for a coveted spot at The Oval.

I’m co-owner of The Food Wolf, a food truck. After reviewing the RFP for food at The Oval, I was left with the overwhelming impression that it was written with one specific aim in mind—to exclude food trucks, the very businesses it proposes to attract.

Here’s why: For one, the RFP stipulates that prospective vendors would be required to hardwire their trucks’ electrical systems into permanent outlets. Call this a conceptual difference, but this requirement manages to take the mobile out of mobile. Food trucks typically operate on generators, or plug into available onsite outlets (outlets that the city has already paid to install!). That way, we can, quite literally, just roll up and do business.

Secondly, the RFP states that food service at The Oval be open daily from 10:30am-8:30pm, but the nature of the mobile food industry is, yes, mobility. We move around, go where the customers are. This is not only the essence of the business, this is how our businesses survive. If we’re at The Oval each day, all day, we’re not anywhere else. We are no longer a roving restaurant, we’re just a food stand in a parked vehicle. And, on those bitterly cold days when The Oval is only populated by a handful of winter diehards, we’re a food stand losing money by the minute. The Oval closes for daily maintenance for several hours a day. At other times, it’s only open to members of the speed-skating community. In a nutshell, it makes no sense for us to be open all day daily, because the guarantee of a regular, or even sporadic, customer-base, just isn’t there.

After catching the after-dinner crowd at Squiggle Park (Falkland and Gottingen Streets), we’d happily relocate to serve evening skaters at The Oval. The problem is, if we’re one place, we can’t be another. And, the only way we can provide the high-quality food that we do is to ensure that we have a higher sales volume. We want to provide better-quality food to our customers, therefore, we need an infrastructure that supports this. Turning out cheap, shitty food is not our mandate, but unfortunately, the current RFP seems to support only this.

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